Love Illuminated: Exploring Life's Most Mystifying Subject (with the Help of 50,000 Strangers)

Summary

From the editor of the New York Times' popular "Modern Love" column, the story of love from beginning to end (or not).

Love. We want it. We need it. We pay it homage with songs and poems and great works of art. And when we lose it, there's no pain as intense or excruciating. For centuries we've been trying to figure it out, control it, or just get better at it. As the editor of a column about love for the New York Times, Daniel Jones reads thousands of stories about people's intimate relationships—the ones that soar, crash, or hum along, from the bizarre to the supposedly “normal.” It's possible that he's read more true love stories than anyone on earth. In Love Illuminated, he teases apart this mystifying emotion that thrills, crushes, and sustains.

Drawing from the 50,000 stories that have crossed his desk over the past decade, Jones explores ten aspects of love—pursuit, destiny, vulnerability, connection, trust, practicality, monotony, infidelity, loyalty, and wisdom—and creates a lively, funny and enlightening journey through this universal human experience that jangles the head and stirs the heart.

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Love Illuminated - Daniel Jones

INTRODUCTION

LET’S START WITH A QUIZ. BOOKS about love often open with a tantalizing quiz so readers can discover, without too much flipping around, how smart they are, or maybe how stupid the book is.

My quiz won’t be the kind where you check your answers against a key to determine your Love IQ. Nor will you be able to upload your responses to an online Personality Pikker® that matches you with a certified LifeMate™ whose compatibility is guaranteed or your money back.

This isn’t a book of ironclad answers or money-back guarantees. I will not be locating Mr. Right by GPS, explaining the psychology of why men love bitches, or providing a list of field-tested strategies for entrapping romantic prey. Very little scientific research underpins anything herein because I am not an esteemed doctor or a lauded academic but a lowly newspaper editor, one who—rather improbably, I admit—reads other people’s love stories for a living.

At the New York Times, I edit a personal-essay column called Modern Love, in which strangers spill their guts about their relationship woes. It’s a job I have worked at more or less full-time for the past nine years, a period during which some fifty thousand laments about love have filtered through my brain and, often, my heart.

The stories arrive by e-mail around the clock, pouring into my laptop, dribbling out of my printer, and spilling across the tables of my office and home. They follow me into bed at night, tag along on family vacations, and ping into my iPhone when I’m walking my dogs or standing on the sidelines of my son’s soccer games. They also frequently are told to me in person, at cocktail parties, and public events and in planes, trains, and automobiles.

When people find out what I do, they invariably say, You must know a lot about love. Or they might invoke the name of the newspaper sex columnist played by Sarah Jessica Parker on Sex and the City and remark, You’re like a male Carrie Bradshaw.

The first person to make that observation was a journalist who interviewed me early on in my job, when I was so out of the loop love-wise that I didn’t even know who Carrie Bradshaw was. I thought the journalist had said, Terry Bradshaw, the famous Steelers quarterback (now Fox Sports analyst) I’d grown up idolizing during my suburban Pittsburgh childhood. It didn’t occur to me to ask what Terry Bradshaw had to do with editing confessional essays about relationships. All I could think was: I’m like a male Terry Bradshaw? But he is male.

Shows how little I knew about love back then. Now, nine years later, I apparently know enough about love to fill a book.

Yet I hardly see myself as some guru who sits atop a mountain of accumulated wisdom in my robe and sandals, eager to dispense sage advice to the lovelorn. In my mind I have not been mastering love all these years so much as marinating in it. Asking me what I have learned about love is like asking a pickle what it has learned about vinegar.

Let me try to explain it another way.

Say you’re on an ocean cruise, and you’re enjoying your narrow experiences and sheltered life, sleeping in your climate-controlled cabin and dining on your private balcony as you gaze out across the ocean, finding it all vaguely pretty as you eat your toast and jam and prepare for your fencing lesson on the lido deck.

That’s sort of what my life felt like before I became the Modern Love editor.

Then one night you stumble over the railing and fall into the ocean. But it’s not just any ocean—you’ve fallen into the Sea of Love.

The Sea of Love may sound sexy and appealing when Robert Plant and the Honeydrippers are singing about it, but in reality it’s a dark and scary place—deep, cold, impenetrable, and populated by billions of freakish creatures lurking in the depths with their gnashing teeth and electrified appendages. Luckily you’ll be stuck in this sea only a short time until your rescue—or so you think. But no one seems to notice your absence, not even your wife, and one day leads to another, and before you know it you’ve spent nearly a decade in the forbidding murk.

Does all this time in the Sea of Love turn you into a marine biologist who’s able to explain why the Caribbean ostracod, a seafloor-dwelling crustacean, uses bioluminescence to attract a mate? Or how the clown fish, a creature of limited mobility, can change its sex from male to female to copulate with a fellow clown fish he brushes up against in his coral cavern?

No, it doesn’t. But when you’ve spent more than a hundred months soaking up the intimate lives of fifty thousand strangers, you can’t help but emerge with an education of some kind. Rushing through your head has been a near-constant stream of all the bizarre and mundane things people do in the name of love, from a serial cheater’s desperate rationalizations to the baffled regrets of those who seem destined—through insecurity or arrogance or both—to destroy every relationship they ever have.

Of course, amid all the head-scratching tales of frustration and betrayal are equally inexplicable stories of bravery and generosity—hopeful leaps from such perilous heights that you almost have to look away, and courage so vast it makes you feel ashamed of your own timidity. Relationships challenge everyone, but why does desire drive some to benevolence and others to corrosive megalomania?

Let’s explore it together. Have you forgotten about our promised quiz? I almost did. Anyway, here it is. Some of these questions might seem a little odd, but then, so is love. Good luck!

1.Do you think it’s better to put a lot of effort into finding love, or leave it to fate?

2.If a word like destiny makes you gag, should you still try to believe in it?

3.Say you have some physical shortcoming, psychological issue, or medical problem you’re embarrassed about that makes you insecure about starting new relationships. When is the best time to inform a new love interest about your perceived inadequacy? Should you come clean early in the relationship and risk scaring the person off? Or is it better to wait until he or she already has fallen for you?

4.Imagine you’re one of an increasing number of couples who met online and never have been together in real life, yet you still feel this is the most important relationship you currently have—the one to which you devote the most time and emotional energy. Do you think a relationship conducted purely online, via words, images, emoticons, and texting shorthand, can be as fulfilling as or possibly even more fulfilling than one conducted in person?

5.Say you are a divorced mother who goes on an online dating service and meets a divorced father from a different city. After an initial e-mail flirtation, you grow close through a series of long, intimate phone calls. He has an odd kind of British accent (he claims he’s originally from London), among other appealing characteristics.

Finally, you arrange to meet; he will come to your city at the end of an international business trip. Alas, he calls you distraught from Nigeria, where he was mugged and beaten and is recuperating in a hospital. He has no passport and no money. Might you wire him a thousand dollars as a loan so he can pay his bills and continue his trip and meet you?

Even though this plea sounds alarmingly similar to a lot of spam e-mails you have received over the years, you somehow trust him. After all, this was a phone call, not an e-mail, and it was from your beloved, not a stranger, even though you have never met him. So you send the money, after which he requests more, so you send more, and so on, until you finally accept that maybe you have indeed fallen victim to a con. You stop responding and ignore his pleas until he gives up, but the experience has left you feeling drained and devastated.

Several months pass before you hear from him again, at which point he admits it was a con and begs your forgiveness. He is not a divorced father from England but a single Nigerian man who has never left his country. The thing is, he truly fell in love with you during all those long phone calls, and he still loves you, or so he claims. He explains that he was warned by his criminal bosses not to develop feelings for any women during the seduction phase of the cons, but with you he did anyway, and now he wants another chance. He promises he will never ask you for money again and says he wants to give up his old ways, escape his old life, and meet you. He cannot leave Nigeria, so you would have to go there.

You are wary but in thrall—you fell in love with him, too, and you are still in love with that soft voice, that gentle temperament. You tell yourself it’s tragic that poverty has forced him to do such awful work. All you feel for him is affection, but both your brain and your friends are trying to convince you that you are certifiably insane if you proceed with this. You proceed with it anyway.

In the airport, he meets you outside of baggage claim with a smile and flowers, whereupon you burst into tears. You spend day after day together and are happy. He asks you for nothing and cons you out of nothing. But the question remains, whether you’re falling for an international con artist or, in a different case, a new crush at your local gym: When people act like they love you, and maybe even say they love you, how can you know if they really do?

6.Congratulations. You have decided to get married and start a family. But like so many people today, you have a hyphenated last name, like Smith-Sullivan, and the person to whom you are engaged also has a hyphenated last name, like Schwartzfelder-Abramowitz. What will you give your children for a last name?

7.Like millions of other bored married people stuck in a midlife rut, you seek out your high school or college sweetheart on Facebook. Soon you find yourself fantasizing about what your life would be like if you had married that person. Like anyone with a libido, you begin to flirt with him or her. Like most people with a family, job, reputation, and friends, you worry about where this might lead.

But you can’t stop. And eventually—no doubt inspired by the heroes of romantic comedies who routinely throw caution to the wind and get rewarded for it—you decide to take the plunge and see each other again in person. You are giddy and terrified as the plan takes shape. You slip out of the house with some excuse to your spouse and offspring. On the way to the restaurant (at the halfway point, two hours away), you sense the whole thing is already out of your hands, which is probably for the best, because your hands are shaking. You consider turning around. And then you think: Why shouldn’t I be allowed to feel this kind of passion again after so many years of not feeling it?

Good question. Why shouldn’t you?

8.As a longtime married person, you find yourself wondering about monogamy and questioning its purpose. You even have discussions with your friends about how sexual fidelity works in the animal kingdom, in which only a precious few species are monogamous, among them gray wolves and black vultures (you can’t help but think the foreboding nature of these examples means something).

In any event, you begin to wonder in an urgent way what it would be like to kiss someone who isn’t your spouse. Or just to flirt, for God’s sake. Have a drink with someone who turns you on and allows you to feel the full bloom of desire one more time before you grow old and die. Of course, you’d love to actually have sex with this person, though that seems kind of unimaginable. But would the other stuff be okay if the opportunity presented itself? Where exactly is the physical and emotional line that divides remaining faithful from cheating?

9.Say your husband or wife experiences a brain-injuring accident, falls prey to early-onset dementia, or succumbs to a destructive addiction. Like most, you sealed your bond years or perhaps decades earlier with idealistic pledges to stand by each other during sickness and health and in good times and bad.

Despite your best intentions and efforts in dealing with your spouse’s diminished abilities and altered personality, you find yourself evaluating the future of your relationship according to a disturbing calculus of what remains versus what’s been lost, and of what you hope you’re capable of versus what you fear you aren’t. Yes, you promised to be loyal and loving until death did you part. But how far do such promises extend? How much self-sacrifice can love reasonably require? And what happens when the person you promised to love no longer seems to be the person you’re married to?

10.Last question. If you’re old enough to be interested in this book, you’re probably old enough to have experienced love many times in various permutations. Do you think love is primarily a feeling or a choice?

Okay, pencils down. How did you do? Did you find yourself muttering, I have no idea to a lot of them? Me too. Bummer, right? How are we supposed to know if we qualify for the Love Mensa Society if we can’t even make it through the starter quiz?

Well, keep reading. Those questions will come up again. In fact, they’ll serve as leaping-off points (or railings to stumble over) in the ten chapters that follow. I can’t promise you all the answers, but answers are overrated anyway. So is advice.

In love, as in life, it’s the questions that count. After all, love is about curiosity, not certainty. It’s about tossing oneself overboard into the wild seas, not remaining safely on deck. So slip into your wet suit and mask and oxygen tank, and take my hand. Oh, and grab a pair of those rubber nose plugs to keep the salt water from shooting up your nostrils on impact. It’s a big drop, and we’re going in.

1

Pursuit

SOMEWHERE OUT THERE

HOW DID YOU FIND LOVE? OR, if you haven’t found it yet, what’s your approach? Are you the type to create lists of desired characteristics, consult experts and dating services, and believe the harder you work at it the more successful you’ll be? Or do you think it’s better to go about your life as usual, working and socializing and meeting prospective lovers as part of your everyday routine, believing that if it’s meant to happen, it will happen? To put it bluntly, are you more of a manic control freak, or some kind of lazy-ass believer in fate?

I confess I fall squarely in the lazy-ass category. And my wife would be the first to admit she tends toward control-freakishness (maybe proactive is a better word). Not to blame everything on birth order, but I have to assume my side of the aisle is mostly populated with second-born children like me who are happy to have someone else in charge. And I bet the proactive side has a majority of firstborns like my wife who managed their younger siblings in childhood and then unconsciously seek out the same dynamic in adult relationships.

Cathi and I met more than two decades ago in Tucson, where I was in graduate school at the University of Arizona pursuing a master of fine arts degree in creative writing on a leisurely four-year plan. Though we were the same age, twenty-seven, she had spent her postcollege years ascending editorial mastheads in the New York magazine world and was looking to attend graduate school as a way to slow down so she could write. I, on the other hand, had grabbed my college degree a year later than she did (having been held back in kindergarten) and headed west to Park City, Utah, where I found work as a ski instructor (winter) and janitor (all seasons).

After two years of skiing and mopping, however, I was eager for a fresh challenge, so I decided to head south to Tucson to write short stories under grapefruit trees. Many semesters later, with graduation looming and my future employment looking doubtful, I’d grown so lethargic that by the time Cathi came to town I was having trouble coming up with reasons to leave the house in the morning.

Which is exactly why we met.

True to her meticulous nature, Cathi researches all options before making any decision. So rather than rely on a book or a phone call to get the inside scoop on Arizona’s graduate writing program, she got her magazine to fly her across the country on assignment so she could check it out firsthand. After meeting with the program director and probing him for all he had to offer, she asked for the names and numbers of female students